Reading through the bug, it's actually a little bit of an interesting choice. For instance, if virtual/editor were part of the @system set instead of nano, it would let you install a preferred replacement or even more than one but wouldn't squawk unless you tried to remove all of 'em. Interesting discussion, in my opinion.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 999 National Security Letters.

You're thinking about EDITOR but that doesn't control anything about Portage. I always install ${MY_FAVORITE_EDITOR} as well. This seems to be a move in the direction of having virtuals instead of packages in the @system set (and perhaps others, too).

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 999 National Security Letters.

Yeah but it tried to remove less and nano on my system and i was perfectly happy with them, I hadn't specifically installed any replacement, just had stuff installed that was pulled in by other packages. Of course adding them to world fixed it but i can just picture this giving new users some headaches as a lot of documentation just assumes that these programs are installed.

Not to mention that it can be annoying if you just want to provide another editor to your users (or I install emacs for own use, doen't mean I want to force everyone to start using it)

Did some Gnome dev sneak in to start cutting everything out of Gentoo until only the bare bones are left?

less and nano should be in the system profile, if people want to remove them they should be able to do so. They shouldn't have to take action just to keep packages that 99% of the users do not want removed._________________Fvwm|Fvwm forum

less and nano should be in the system profile, if people want to remove them they should be able to do so.

That's a contradiction, if a package is in the system profile then it can't be removed, at least not without adding it to package.provided to stop it being pulled in.

Nano is actually my editor of choice, but I agree with this way of doing things, but seeing as nano is more or less "the default" (by virtue of being included in the stage tarballs) then I think even if another editor is installed which satisfies the virtual, nano should only be uninstalled if the user manually unmerges it, not by depclean, and then no longer be pulled in on account of the other virtual-satisfying editor.
At least, that would be the ideal solution (IMO) but I get how it's not that simple._________________"You have to invite me in"

I think a good compromise would be for them to be included in the world file by default. Then if a user wants to remove them they can but they won't get purged by --depclean.

That would do the trick, however there isn't any world file by default, and this alone doesn't seem a big enough issue to justify changing that.

Maybe not, but the way it is now isn't really acceptable either. If you manage to break some dependency of $FANCY_EDITOR that made depclean unmerge nano you're shit out of luck. I seem to remember some library that managed to break both emacs and vim when it's abi changed (hell, libpng can break emacs if it's compiled with png support). If portage then would have had the bright idea to remove nano, well, better hope you have that boot medium handy.

The charm of nano is that it's there, depends on next to nothing (and thus very rarely breaks and probably isn't affected by anything that could break your regular editor) and is so small that it being there doesn't get in anyone's way, it's also easy to use for everybody, unlike vi(m) or emacs. The same goes for less. Both have become de-facto standard applications on GNU/Linux systems._________________Fvwm|Fvwm forum

That would do the trick, however there isn't any world file by default, and this alone doesn't seem a big enough issue to justify changing that.

Sure there is. /var/lib/portage/world is in the stage3. It's just empty. Not sure what would be involved in adding some thing to it. I'm not familair with how gentoo builds stage 3. And while it seems like a little problem not worth the time, you know what they say

Quote:

If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves

Not interested in editor wars. Am I the only one that realises depclean removing part of the @system dependency chain is completely f'ing broken behaviour?_________________Quantity is not quality.
overlay | runit-scripts

Nano is actually my editor of choice, but I agree with this way of doing things, but seeing as nano is more or less "the default" (by virtue of being included in the stage tarballs) then I think even if another editor is installed which satisfies the virtual, nano should only be uninstalled if the user manually unmerges it, not by depclean, and then no longer be pulled in on account of the other virtual-satisfying editor.
At least, that would be the ideal solution (IMO) but I get how it's not that simple.

Uninstalling anything installed contained in an RDEPEND=" || ( )" is dangerous.
Portage recently started to just remove all but one. Some call it a feature, some a bug.
At least one can say emerge --depclean became a whole lot more dangerous.

If the bug would be fixed you would see the behaviour which you describe as ideal.

But essentially every editor is an "or" dependency of virtual/editor. Does that mean that Portage shouldn't remove any of them? But, okay, I understand your position. However, you will probably admit that the situation is a little more nuanced than what you were portraying. I happen to like it, though. I like that more things are implemented as (what I think of as) reasonable general cases instead of arbitrary choices made for me.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 999 National Security Letters.

If you manage to break some dependency of $FANCY_EDITOR that made depclean unmerge nano you're shit out of luck. I seem to remember some library that managed to break both emacs and vim when it's abi changed (hell, libpng can break emacs if it's compiled with png support). If portage then would have had the bright idea to remove nano, well, better hope you have that boot medium handy.